"I can't thank you enough for helping me torch the Constitution!"
Kim Strassel just can't let it go. It seems every time any serious effort is mounted to hold her antihero Trump legally accountable (for his criminal and traitorous acts), she flips out. Such was the case with her latest screed-worthy column ('Jack Smith's October Surprise', WSJ, Oct. 4, p. A13). Therein she loses it over special counsel Jack Smith's newly unsealed 165-page filing in his January 6th criminal case against Donald Trump. Easily the most notorious American Traitor since Benedict Arnold. But maybe Strassel, true to her previous yappings (e.g. 'Durham and the Clinton Dossier', WSJ, Nov. 15, 2021, p. A13): against what she reviles as "lawfare", insists Smith and the DOJ are guilty of election interference. She writes:
"Even if he's the upright legal hero of the left' description, the timing and nature of his actions provide an inescapable appearance of election interference."
And I say, Bollocks! They provide no such "inescapable appearance" to anyone with more than air between the ears who has been following the case and the deliberate foot-dragging of the Supremes for the 6 months leading up to their roundly condemned decision, e.g.
And as Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe noted therein:
"This president will have now ended up being above the law because he will have managed to have used the procedural gimmicks and gears of the legal system to avoid being held accountable before he could again assume office and make the whole trial go away."
So Smith had no choice, in order to rescue constitutional normality, to file his brief whether Strassel likes the timing or not. Especially as I pointed out in the same post:
"The reason is that such interference was totally unnecessary given the D.C. Appellate Court had already given an exhaustive ruling. Especially exposing the insanity of Trump's lawyer John Sauer claiming absolute immunity even for the use of assassination for a political opponent would be justified under certain circumstances."
The inopportune timing, before the election, is totally due to the corrupt 'Supreme 6' dragging their feet for months, putting Smith in that fallback position. It was either act - filing an extensive brief to get around the court's cockeyed codswallop - or let a certified traitor and convicted felon potentially cakewalk into the White House. When this orange pestilence isn't fit to enter a porto-potty for cleaning duties.
Kim, alas, is so blind she can't even see Trump's criminality, squawking:
"Mr. Smith is actively working to undermine a Trump re-election by presenting to the public a bevy of new claims painting the nominee as criminal...."
Uh, newsflash, Kim, he IS a criminal! She perhaps needs help in jogging her memory about what transpired mere months ago:
But knowing her history of disingenuous pro-Trump apologias disguised as WSJ columns, one can't be too confident. The regular Kim Strassel monitor will easily recall her Nov. 15, 2021, WSJ effort in which she scribbled:
"Special counsel John Durham’s indictments have turned any number of narratives on their heads, including the question of which 2016 presidential campaign was in bed with Russians. It wasn’t Donald Trump’s.”
So once more it appears her mind 'left the reservation' either willingly or randomly, as she also failed to acknowledge the multifold evidence clearly contained in docs pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
The 1917 Espionage Act was actually used to put former AF officer Reality Winner in a federal prison for leaking many of these docs. One could argue that would hardly have been the case if the documents were merely vanilla 'doc-speak' or bogus. But Winner's Snowden-like release was so damning that the Trump DOJ- under then AG Bill Barr, literally had no choice than to turf her into the slammer for 5+ years and throw away the key.
Add to all that we've since learned from WaPo star journalist Bob Woodward (in his latest book, 'WAR', that Traitor Trump secretly sent Covid test kits to Putin while our own country was suffering a test shortage, i.e.
Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, book says
Worse, Woodward also exposed how the Traitor has contacted Putin no fewer than seven times since he was booted from office. Meanwhile, much of the material applicable in the Russian 2016 interference case also underlay The Mueller Report, i.e.
www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
Also in his indictments of 12 Russian (GRU) agents.
[Read
the indictment here.]
Mueller felt his hands were tied by a DOJ directive that prevented special counsels and prosecutors going full "Perry Mason" under a nebulous, long standing rule not to press to hard in criminal cases against sitting presidents - even if they were clearly traitors. So once Barr let loose his watered down "summary" of Mueller's report, e.g.
It was "case closed" and the reactionary Right's media sewage pickers tarred the whole exercise as a "hoax". They were confident Barr had delivered the 'chops' to reduce the whole sordid episode of the Russian election assistance to one word they'd beat to death like they did "liberal" 40 years earlier.
Naturally then, Strassel and the whole stable of WSJ pro-Trump hacks and trolls - like Danny Henninger and Holman Jenkins Jr. - could run their fish wrap columns with that narrative. So all this serves to illuminate Strassel's latest effort as well as her previous ones, and it exposes just as many errors of fact, law, and knowledge of the Constitution.
For example when she brays:
"The justices already rapped him for ignoring a weighty question in his Jan. 6 indictment- ruling that a president is entitled to immunity for exercising "core constitutional powers".
But enlisting Seal Team 6 - or any other outfit - to conduct an assassination of a political opponent, is not exercising core constitutional powers and is clearly not eligible for immunity. This was an issue the D.C. Appellate court had already decided but which Trump's renegade 6 Supremes dismissed. This is especially significant given the insanity of Trump's lawyer (John Sauer) claiming absolute immunity even for the use of assassination for a political opponent (which he claimed would be justified under certain circumstances.) Given the D.C. ruling the Supremes should have butted out and allowed the trial with Jack Smith (in front of Judge Chutkin) to go forward - back in MARCH. That instead Smith was forced to do an end around the court to nail the traitor before the election is not his fault, it is the corrupt Trump Supremes for their unconscionable 6 month delay! See e.g.
‘This is B.S.’: Maddow shreds ‘cravenness’ of Supreme Court delaying Trump trial (youtube.com)
The other daft claim of Strassel, i.e.
"While certain presidential acts have absolute immunity, many others - including conversations with a vice president about his duty to oversee the counting of electoral votes- have presumptive immunity and the burden is on the government to rebut that premise."
Not so! Not when the 'conversations' amount to an illicit order from the president to refuse to certify an election so that he can illegally remain in power!
The very fact Jack Smith now has smoking gun evidence (as part of his brief) showing Trump's communications with Pence and that he didn't even care ("So what?") when alerted the life of his vice president was threatened as the insurrection unfolded, is also damning. It shows he acted as a private insurrectionist plotter - not as any "president exercising "presumptive official duties" of his office. That neither Kim, or the Supremes who came up with this "presumptive immunity" BS - is mind boggling.
What was Trump doing all that time? Sitting back watching the
mayhem on his 65- inch HDTV screen. He actually had hoped his MAGA minion mutts
would string up Pence for not obeying his orders. Thus, we must now
consign this MAGA faction of the court to also being traitors like Trump given
they are willing to protect him by granting immunity. Which means the
only final arbiters (and deliverers) of justice will be the voters again - as
they were 4 years ago.
Strassel, ever refusing to be a changeling scribe writes at
the end:
"If Kamala Harris does win, half the country will point to this filing as a reason - the latest Justice Department interference in an election."
To which I respond: "Horse shit!"
If Kamala does win, and I believe she will in a landslide, it will be because more than half the country finally sees this orange traitor for the absolute, derelict scum he is - especially how he's risked thousands of lives in the hurricane zone states with his vile lies about FEMA.
Let this pig lose 'bigly' and then rot in prison before rotting in Hell. And only a MAGA know-nothing nincompoop (or apologist like Kim Strassel) would blame such a loss on "election interference".
See Also:
by Maya Boddie | October 9, 2024 - 6:33am | permalink
After CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel reported Tuesday morning that veteran journalist Bob Woodard's new book includes a revealing exchange between Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin that took place at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the MSNBC contributor later highlighted what she thinks are the two most important words in her reporting.
Gangel — along with CNN's Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart — noted in their report that Woodward's book, "War", "reveals new details about Donald Trump’s private conversations with Putin – and a secret shipment of Covid-19 testing equipment Trump sent to the Russian president for his personal use during the height of the pandemic."
Speaking with Gangel Tuesday night, CNN host Kaitlan Collins emphasized the part of the reporting "that was so fascinating is that in the height of the pandemic when Americans are struggling to get Covid tests, Trump actually sent some to Putin in Russia."
Gangel replied, "And I think there are two key words here — not only according to Woodward's book did Trump send some to Putin — but it was a secret shipment for Putin's personal use."
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | October 8, 2024 - 6:43am | permalink
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17-year-old over the weekend who's taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She's following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and outs of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn't really considered it before. We were talking about the vice-presidential debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Donald Trump's brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn't of interest until Trump came along. That's a lot of people who don't know that it isn't supposed to be this way.
Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It's also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump's presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he's gone?
And:
by David Badash | October 8, 2024 - 6:31am | permalink
On the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, Donald Trump took a deep dive into antisemitic and Nazi rhetoric.
The ex-president—win or lose—near the end of his final White House run told right-wing political commentator and host Hugh Hewitt that immigrants have “bad genes” which make them more likely to commit murder. It is a charge some say is direct out of Nazi eugenics.
Just hours later Trump unleashed a “vile trifecta” of antisemitism, according to Andrew Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs.
“Israel has to do one thing,” Trump had told Hewitt. “They have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. It’s not reciprocal.”
Those words unleashed great anger and pain.
And:
by Thom Hartmann | October 8, 2024 - 5:49am | permalink
Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru (whose president denied Covid was dangerous) — be what’s fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Are we, in other words, as a nation suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that’s driving a national mental illness crisis that opened the door for Trump’s cult to grow?
— Colorado elections worker Tina Peters, for example, was just sent to prison for nine years for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 election; she’d completely bought into Trump’s lie that Democrats had stolen that election and is paying for it with the rest of her life.
— My barber was telling me this past weekend about how one of his regulars is stocking up on guns, ammunition, and dried food in anticipation of a second Civil War. This guy is now fully in the Trump cult and is thus perfectly willing to kill his neighbors for politics, once somebody declares the war is now underway (as many of these guys expect Trump to do in the next few weeks).
>— All across America, families are being torn apart by the Trump cult, and sometimes the conflicts even lead to violence.
And:
'He wants Russia to win': Susan Rice blasts 'dangerous' Trump over his ties to Putin (msnbc.com)
And:
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